brian

jake

Who, who, who, who? – “The Who(The Who are an English rock band who first came to prominence in the 1960s, and grew in stature to become one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands of all time)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Are_You_%28song%29

[Note to regular blog readers: This post is my introduction to other participants of 2006 PodCamp Boston. ]

I’m Brian Christiansen and I’m a blogger. One who doesn’t particularly like the word “blog,” but I’ve been blogging since 2001, and reading them since before that.

I have a pair of blogs, this one is called Recently. A (We)blog – which is jointly authored by my long time friend and cohort Jake. We focus on technology, with some design, politics and recent events. We also built this place from scratch. Jake gets credit for the vast majority of code, while I did most of the dreaming up of features, IA and about two-thirds of the writing. We split the remaining tasks like CSS and XHTML. It lives in a subdomain of our side business, Rain Hypertext in which we offer design and build services for any sort of online presence, but we like to focus on under-served sectors like small businesses and non-profits. They tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to quality sites, especially when it comes to getting semantic and valid XHTML and CSS construction. We have built many a blog, using TextPattern and WordPress, as well as our own backend.

My other blog is Noreaster – which is an “everything else” blog. If it doesn’t belong on Recently, I put it here. WordPress.com is a great free site for blogs, but it’s just temporary until we get full personal blogs on the main site. Till then, I’m not going to pay the WP CSS tax, and I’ll just use their standard template.

I haven’t yet mentioned podcasting in my bio, and that’s because I’m a podcaster in search of a podcast. I have the tools and know-how, but nothing to really talk about as of yet. This is one of my main reasons for coming — I’m looking to do something. I do download to a wide selection of them, audio and video. I’m a particularly big fan of anything NPR. I hope to bump into some GBH and PRX guys at PodCamp, in fact.

What do I do? When I’m not working on computers, I’m working on computers. I’m a Mac Genius for Apple Computer. I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly written that here on this blog before. That’s because they have a very succinct policy on blogging: don’t involve your job in it. And I have mortgage bills, so I listen. I’ve taught a good deal of technical training and one thing I’d love to podcast about is how to do basic troubleshooting and maintenance on your Mac. Essentially, a trip to the Genius Bar with out the trip. I’m not holding my breath for the edict from above. For the purposes of this conference, if you’re having Mac or iPod troubles, for goodness sakes, come find me! Unofficially, of course, I’m your man.

What else? I’m a wiki aficionado, especially Instiki. I’m very sad that it’s development is seemingly going stale. If you know someone in Boston who would like to help me learn Ruby (and then Rails) I’d love to work on that.

I’m considering going to grad school, and if I do, I would study Instructional Design and Educational Technology. If you’re involved in either of these topics and are at the conference, I’d love to chat with you. I have a couple years experience with this when I attended and later was employed by the University of Connecticut, which I enjoyed immensely. Also, while I was there I gained a BA in Visual Communications, which was an individualized major which incorporated design, communications science and journalism. All of that pretty much led me to new media. I would hope to develop new and innovative uses for blogs, wikis and podcasts for education, and gain a greater skills building with open and standard technologies like RSS, Atom, other XMLish formats like microformats, and I’m very intrigued by Participatory Culture’sDemocracy and Broadcast Machine.

Outside of technology I’m a life-long percussionist and an avid cycling fan (both on road and preferably on dirt). I attempt to live a sustainable life in Medford, MA near Tufts with my lovely wife, our miniature schnauzer puppy, and our pet TiVo ;-).